Halo 3 Single-Player First Look with Dev Team Q&A: Live from E3 2007

We weren't able to play the game this time around (Microsoft is only allowing "eyes-on" demos at E3), but we did speak to its writing lead about first-person mode. Suffice it to say, Halo 3 looks exactly as good as everyone wants it to be, and probably a little better.

SANTA MONICA, Calif.—It's practically the reason we came to E3: a first look at Halo 3's single-player campaign. I played the multiplayer beta a few months ago (click here for video), and it featured some new weapons and supped-up graphics.

The scene we watched, played on Heroic difficulty by O'Connor, was part of the first mission of the game. The environment was reminiscent of the early outdoor levels in the original Halo, with plenty of rocks, trees and blue skies. It's a testament to the first game's design that the trees didn't seem exponentially more detailed, and rock faces looked just as textured and craggy. There were tweaks, to be sure, like the ghostly matrix that overlays the screen when you take damage, but that was in the multiplayer beta, too. The biggest upgrade was the lighting, specifically the way bright sunlight washed out buildings on the riverside.

Halo 3's graphics are as clean and purposeful as ever, not so much showing off as enabling immersive gameplay. Nothing looks bad, ever, which means nothing distracts you during the fight. One of the highlights was when O'Connor picked up a machinegun turret, firing from the hip—a la Jesse Ventura in Predator—at a hovering Covenant ship. The ship targeted him with its own turret, and the exchange of heavy weapons fire was thunderous, with hundreds of rounds cracking off the alien hull and energy bolts detonating against the stone column he was using as cover. But even when the ship exploded, it wasn't over the top. That single confrontation is exactly what Halo has always been about: epic, chaotic, even brutal, but never crowd-pleasing and superfluous.

There were brilliant details, too, like the grunt alien that blurted out, "That was my friend!" in the middle of the killing spree. The enemy's AI seemed as good as Bungie has promised—at one point the aliens scattered under heavy fire, retreated out of sight and then returned to fight as a regrouped unit.

But the appeal of the Halo series has always been the equal attention paid to both story-driven action and well-balanced multiplayer competition. Frank O'Connor, Bungie's writing lead on Halo 3, breaks all that down in this video with new footage from the game:

We also got a look at the Save Films feature, which records every second of gameplay, both in Campaign and Multiplayer, so you can go back and watch a given scene from any angle (your camera hovers and swoops in space). You can stop, rewind, fast-forward and take snapshots of the action to post online. You can also send a specific snippet of footage to a friend over Xbox Live, like a slow-mo close-up of the precise moment you utterly destroyed him.

We weren't able to play the game this time around (Microsoft is only allowing "eyes-on" demos at E3), but, suffice it to say, Halo 3 looks exactly as good as everyone wants it to be, and probably a little better.